So far, the U.S. economy has not actually fallen for one full quarter, let along two, but it is growing at a historically weak level, compared to past recessions. And some already think the U.S. economy is headed for a double dip.
"Amid all the absurd posturing over raising the debt ceiling comes some real news—and it’s very bad," says the New Yorker. "According to new government figures, the economy has hardly grown at all in 2011."

Apparently the U.S. Justice Department thinks there might be anti-competitive implications in the recent sale of Nortel patents to a consortium of firms including Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion, the Wall Street Journal reports. A consortium of six companies last month paid $4.5 billion to acquire a portfolio of 6,000 patents auctioned by the bankrupt Canadian telecom equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp. Google had made an initial bid of $900 million. The Wall Street Journal says some observers were "stunned" at the sales price, which has raised Justice Department concern about what return the bidders expect on the investment. U.S. Steps Up Probe of Nortel Patent Deal - WSJ.com (subscription required) Recently, some Android handset manufacturers reportedly have agreed to pay Microsoft $5 per device in licensing fees, perhaps raising speculation that Google's rivals think they can impose more costs on Android handset manufacturers. http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/…

In 2016, ABI Research forecasts that there will be 103 million 4G wholesale subscribers, served by mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that buy capacity and services from a facilities-based provider and then retail services under their own brand names.

ABI Research estimates there were about 3.8 million 4G wholesale subscribers in 2010.

Other forecasts suggest lower adoption. Separately, Ovum forecasts that global MVNO connections will reach 85.6 million by 2015, and revenues are expected to be $9.5 billion. In other words, ABI Research believes there will be more 4G MVNO customers than Ovum believes will exist in the entire MVNO market, including the much-larger 3G market.

Over the next five years, new MVNO markets are expected to open up in South and Central America, Asia-Pacific, and in the Middle East. However, there are still regulatory and market challenges to overcome before these markets can offer an environment that can sustain MVNO activity.

"One fairly common 'law of web and mobile physics' is the ratio of registered users or downloads to monthly actives, daily actives, and max concurrent users (for services that have a real time component to them), says venture capitalist Fred Wilson. "I call this ratio 30/10/10 and so many services that we see exhibit it within a few percentage points here and there." What Wilson sees is that, for most providers, 30 percent of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each month. About 10 percent of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each day.

The maximum number of concurrent users of a real-time service will be 10 percent of the number of daily users. A VC: 30/10/10

Necessity is the mother of invention, and that is likely to be true for mobile advertising as well. Because of constraints on-screen size, display ads will not be the preferred or logical format, many would argue. That might explain why there is so much activity around e-commerce, coupons, promotional messages and other "non-traditional" marketing and advertising formats being tried in the mobile business.

For years, Apple has confounded the rest of us by not buying things that it should clearly be buying. Not purchasing other well-known companies is so core to Apple’s strategy that it must have a whole department devoted to non-mergers and un-acquisitions, whimsically argues Harry McCracken, editor of Technologizer

It's just part of Apple's culture, as making and integrating acquisitions is part of Cisco's culture, or how some other companies seem to make acquisitions whose value is destroyed after the acquisitions. So a recent speculation that Apple might buy Barnes & Noble would likely wind up being the latest rumor not to prove accurage.

To give you some idea of how hard it actually is for a large communications carrier to create a new line of business that has a meaningful impact on revenue, consider an analysis Tristan Louis at TNL.net recently conducted. He took a look at valuations and implied average revenue per user for some of the leading Internet companies, including Pandora, LinkedIn, Groupon, LivingSocial and Zynga. His analysis suggests it is possible to generate between $3.57 and $4.58 per user per year. By the same token, it could be possible that a user is worth between $106.46 and $126.24 over the user’s lifetime to a publicly traded web 2.0 company. But assuming such deals were contemplated, you can see the problem. Even if a telco could somehow create enough value for any of these services to create a role in the revenue stream, the net result is that the effort is more trouble than it really is worth.

Assume an average of $4.25 annual revenue per user. Assume a telco could create enough value to warrant…

Communication service providers committed almost $8 billion to cloud-related pursuits in the first six months of 2011, but recent acquisitions won’t boost cloud revenues overnight and service differentiation remains poor, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. That finding is not terribly surprising, given the relative newness of the business and the cost of investing in facilities.

Informa estimates that the typical provider generates less than five percent of its enterprise revenues from annuity cloud services. That sounds like a small amount, but can be quite significant for a large provider. Some might point out that text messaging revenue only accounts for about five percent of Verizon Wireless revenue, but it is a quite-important revenue source.Telcos Invest in Cloud, Immediate Return not the Issue - Carrier Evolution

Google has purchased 1,000 technology patents from International Business Machines Corp. as the Web-search giant stocks up on intellectual property to defend itself against lawsuits. The patents involve the "fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips," computer architecture including servers and routers and online search engines, among other things. Read more here. (subscription required)

Some might argue the litigation-heavy U.S. business climate is stifling innovation. There have been continual patent infringement lawsuits filed recently in the mobile device space, for example. Read more.

Amazon.com has some advantages as a content marketer. Like other retailers of "content" or "entertainment" products, it can use trailers, book reviews and descriptions as content marketing vehicles. But unusually, even for a content retailer, Amazon has the ability to give away professional content as part of a direct revenue model.

Amazon Prime is a membership service that, for $79 a year, gives Amazon customers free shipping on their purchases as well as no-extra-charge access to the Prime Instant Video streaming library. The Amazon Prime membership is a revenue-generating loyalty device, which provides clear incentives for members to keep buying from Amazon.

Pursuant to that strategy, Amazon.com added a new licensing agreement with NBCUniversal Domestic TV Distribution that will allow Amazon Prime members to stream select Universal Pictures movies through Prime Instant Video. This deal with Amazon will bring the total number of Prime instant videos to more than 9…

Social media has caused businesses to set up, or to feel they have to set up, Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and blogs to connect with as many customers as possible. Waylaid somewhere along the way, however, were the fundamentals of public relations, marketing, corporate communications and sales, giving way to erroneous assumptions about how businesses should manage their social marketing, some would argue.

Among the five biggest misconceptions is the notion that somebody other than you knows "social media," and is qualified to give you advice, argues Mikal E. Belicove is an "Entrepreneur" magazine columnist.

That might seem a "harsh" judgment, but for most smaller and start-up businesses, it is true enough.

The problem is that the art form still is developing. Some people have more experience, it is true, but at this point we all are still experimenting.

Perhaps one analogy is parenting. Some do it very well, almost instinctively, while others have t…

Communication service providers committed almost $8 billion to cloud-related pursuits in the first six months of 2011, but recent acquisitions won’t boost cloud revenues overnight and service differentiation remains poor, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. That finding is not terribly surprising, given the relative newness of the business and the cost of investing in facilities.

Informa estimates that the typical provider generates less than five percent of its enterprise revenues from annuity cloud services. That sounds like a small amount, but can be quite significant for a large provider. Some might point out that text messaging revenue only accounts for about five percent of Verizon Wireless revenue, but it is a quite-important revenue source. Of the 10 acquisitions and 21 investments announced in the first half of 2011, 80 percent involved data centers. Using a five-year return on invested capital rule of thumb, the invested $8 billion implies annual expected revenue of $1…

Sprint's shares on July 28, 2011 suffered their biggest intraday drop since 2008 as its second quarter results missed analyst forecasts, and an unclear 4G strategy, despite firm news of a deal with LightSquared that at least clarifies part of Sprint's Long Term Evolution approach. It isn't entirely clear whether the drop was caused by investor concerns about ongoing churn, or uncertainty about Sprint's long-term strategy. The future of its relationship with Clearwire, though, remains unsettled. The deal with LightSquared is tactically helpful, assuming LightSquared can mollify the GPS community about interference issues. That is one major issue, but there are others, including the loss of about half its potential spectrum if LightSquared has to avoid using the "L" band frequencies where GPS interference issues exist. Longer term, some will have questions about the viability of a wholesale-only strategy, as well as ability to raise the rest of the capital neede…

FastCustomer, an iPhone and Android app, claims to have saved its users 220,000 minutes they otherwise would have spent "on hold." FastCustomer will call any company’s call center or any department and wait on hold for you. The app saves you time and eliminates the need to listen to elevator music

On the free iPhone or Android app, just tap a button telling the app which company you need to reach, then go back to living your life.

Are Apple executives weighing a possible bid to buy Barnes & Noble? That's the rumor reported to Boy Genius Report by an as yet "unproven" source.

Apple presumably then would fold the Barnes & Noble digital library of books and publication into Apple’s own iBooks store.

Apple would have no use for the Nook, and that would likely be discontinued in this scenario. Apple could then convert some of the brick and mortar Barnes & Noble stores into Apple stores and close the rest. Apple easily can afford the transaction. Some of us would lament the loss of the retail bookstores, or the possible demise of the Nook. Along with Amazon's coming Android tablet, the Nook has seemed to some the best chance for a branded Android tablet to create a niche in the tablet market that actually answers the question of "why buy it instead of an iPad?" Does Apple have any interest in buying Barnes & Noble?

More than half of 302 executives surveyed by Harris Interactive on behalf of Capgemini say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64 percent of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74 percent) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care using the social Web.

Most (57 percent) see social media as a means for "inviting customer input on product and services, lead generation, responding to complaints, internal reporting, and measuring customer satisfaction." However, there's still a sizable minority (13 percent) that believe social media is just a fad and is not important to their company's success.Study: Execs Aren't Yet Sure What to do About Social Media

Some of us might see an important implication in the Verizon Wireless decision to distribute $10 billion to its two owners, Verizon Communications and Vodafone. And that observation is that Verizon needs the cash to help pay dividends, because Verizon does not any longer generate the cash to pay its own common dividend, said Craig Moffett, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst.'There simply isn't any cash elsewhere in the business to fund the common dividend,' Bernstein said. A rational person might conclude that, over the longer term, something has to change. Either Verizon lowers its dividend, which most would assume is the last thing Verizon would do, or Verizon Communications has to find some way to boost its revenues and profits to maintain the dividend. There might be other short-term expedients, such as asset sales, but that can only go so far. The other implication is that observers who believe Verizon easily can afford to invest in its fixed line infrastructure …

PayPal executives have been pretty clear that they are going to be "agnostic" about the ways mobile phones can communicate with payment terminals, and eBay, PayPal owner, has "put its money where its mouth is" by buying Zong, which provides carrier billing, with some 250 carriers globally.eBay buys Zong

"Trying to sound really smart is really, really dumb," argues Marcus Schaller, a content marketing strategist, speaker and author of "The Lead Ladder-Turn Strangers into Clients, One Step at a Time." His basic point is that simple, clear language is important.

"You see it every day; puffed up blog posts, white papers, webinars and website copy full of important sounding jargon," he says. "The less of it you understand, the more important it must be."

Corporate/Marketing Speak is a relic of the days before Google and RSS feeds, a time when information wasn’t at everyone’s fingertips. A white paper in 1998 didn’t have to compete with the same avalanche of information as the white paper of 2011. So be clear, he argues.

There's a similar analogy, less about jargon and more about "parading knowledge," though. Most of us attend conferences and trade shows. That means most of us sit through PowerPoint presentations. If you take a survey of c…

"Mobile payments and the mobile wallet are turning out to be completely different things," says David Schropfer, consultant and author of "The SmartPhone Wallet."
The mobile wallet, which allows a user to store and access a number of accounts and credit cards linked to loyalty programs and offers, all from a mobile device, is developing in the U.S. mainly as a way to attract consumers with plenty of other payment options. "I don't think there will be much market adoption of the mobile wallet without it being attached to other options." In the developing world, the focus is more directly on enabling people to send money to each other, and other institutions, directly from a mobile phone, because the banking infrastructure is undeveloped.

Mobile payment analyst Bruce Burke argues that a variety of "front ends" will develop, using multiple brand ecosystems, devices and mobile service providers, typically using established transactions networks. …

Wireless Intelligence now forecasts that global wireless service provider revenue will hit $1.1 trillion in 2012. Why is that significant? Over the last decade, global fixed-line revenue was about $1 trillion. So the new forecast suggests that mobile service revenue will surpass fixed-line revenue on a global basis by 2012, if not before. Global mobile revenues will be $1.1 Trillion in 2012

It long has been the case that mobile revenues have outstripped fixed-line revenue in developed markets.

What is new is that revenue in developing markets, the new global revenue engine of growth, also will shift to wireless. As recently as 2007, wireline revenues still were more than 50 percent of total industry revenues.

The latest JD Power survey of customer service performance shows that Verizon Wireless is now at the top of the mobile service provider rankings. Verizon Wireless scored a 770 (out of a total 1,000 points) which was the highest score in “JD Power & Associates 2011 Wireless Customer Care Performance Study – Volume 2″.

Until the announcement of the T-Mobile AT&T merger, the top spot in the Wirelss Customer Care Performance Study was T-Mobile USA. The last survey before the latest survey had Sprint at the top.

Android now owns 39 percent of the smart phone market in the U.S. up three percent from the previous period measured by Nielsen. Apple controls 28 percent, which is up two percent from the prior quarter.

Research in Motion is at 20 percent, down by three percent. Microsoft's combined mobile OS share is at nine percent, which is down seven percent.

LightSquared, now building a new wholesale-only Long Term Evolution network, has signed a 15-year deal with Sprint that expedites LightSquared's construction timetable by allowing it to co-locate on existing Sprint towers. The deal also will save LightSquared a significant amount of capital investment as well.

Under the agreement, LightSquared will pay Sprint to deploy and operate a nationwide LTE network that hosts L-Band spectrum licensed to or available to LightSquared. Also, for the first 11 years, LightSquared will make payments to Sprint of approximately $9 billion in cash for spectrum hosting and network services, as well as LTE and satellite purchase credits Sprint can use which are currently estimated to be valued at approximately $4.5 billion. The agreement also provides Sprint the opportunity to purchase up to 50 percent of LightSquared’s expected L-Band 4G capacity. The wholesale purchase credits will provide Sprint the option to obtain lower cost wholesale access to LT…

"Our super-fast broadband network has now passed over five million premises and the customer base has almost trebled in the last six months," says BT CEO Ian Livingston. That network can provide speeds up to 100 Mbps.

But BT didn't say precisely how many subscribers that tripling represented. So far, service providers offering very-high-speed services (50 Mbps or 100 Mbps) have gotten very low penetration, and do not provide actual subscriber figures. BT seems to be in that camp as well.

Google is preparing to launch "Page Speed Service," which promises to speed up any website's page-loading performance by as much as 25 percent to 60 percent. Page Speed ServiceTo use the service, webmasters need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices. Presumably the service will be offered without charge initially, then as a subscription service. See an example of test results here https://code.google.com/speed/pss/docs/tryit.html

As the European country with the most contactless payment terminals in place, along with high-profile near field communications commercial rollouts either already launched or planned this year, what happens in the United Kingdom offers a sign for how contactless payment might fare in the rest of Europe and beyond, NFC Times believes.

There will be about 25 million contactless cards on issue and roughly 10 percent of the country’s merchants will be equipped to accept them by the end of 2011, predicted James McDonald, who heads contactless payments for Barclaycard Global Payment Acceptance, the merchant acquiring arm for Barclays bank and the bank’s Barclaycard credit card unit.UK Contactless to Reach a Tipping Point in 2011?

"Being in the payments business is harder than saying you're in the payments business," says Sam Shrauger, PayPal VP. PayPal clearly is gearing up for an extension of its online payments business to retail and physical settings.

Shrauger says PayPal plans to hold trials with stores by the end of the year, and hopes to be operational at stores run by 20 large retailers by the end of 2012.

Much of the industry is focusing on near field communications, but PayPal seems to prefer a communications-agnostic approach. "Relying on a single technology makes it very difficult for the consumer," Shrauger says.

According to a recent Nielsen survey, the majority of Netflix users report watching on a TV screen.

Also, half of all Netflix users connect via a game console (Wii, PS3 or Xbox Live).

Conversely for Hulu, watching directly on a computer is the dominant way consumers connect.

Eighty-nine percent of Hulu users watch directly on a computer, while 42 percent of Netflix users report watching on their computers.

One-fifth of Hulu users and 14 percent of Netflix users also report that they stream by connecting their computer to the TV. Other over-the-top, Internet-enabled devices, such as Roku Box, Google TV and Apple TV, were also cited as means for connecting with Hulu and Netflix. Respondents were able to select more than one viewing method to best reflect their viewing habits.

Facebook is in talks to let developers sell virtual goods within mobile Web browsers, part of an effort to generate more revenue from smartphones and tablet computers, Bloomberg reports. Facebook’s currency, called Credits, would be a feature developers could add to their mobile apps. That means Facebook could get about 30 percent of revenue generated by the sale of virtual goods. Facebook Said to Be in Talks to Bring Credits to Mobile Browsers

While telcos are well-placed to take advantage of the burgeoning cloud computing market, they face considerable challenges when it comes to supporting and selling cloud services, according to Ovum.

Telcos can leverage existing assets, such as their communications networks, data centers, OSS and BSS systems and existing customer relationships, to offer cloud services to enterprises. However, while telcos’ assets do provide them with some key advantages over other cloud providers, there are a number of significant challenges that they face.

“Aside from a perceived lack of brand identity in the supply of IT services, obstacles such as bringing internal network and IT teams together, enabling sales teams, and ensuring that OSS and BSS systems can deliver on cloud’s on-demand nature, must be overcome," says Mark Giles, Ovum analyst. Significant operational hurdles for telco cloud services

A number of Taiwan-based integrated circuit design houses are expected to see their sales move up vigorously in the third quarter of 2011 due to their shipments of IC parts to the supply chain for Amazon's 7- and 10-inch tablet PCs to be launched in the third quarter, according to DigiTimes.

With Amazon targeting to ship four million tablet PCs in 2011, IC orders from Amazon have become the second largest order from the tablet PC sector, trailing only the iPad, DigiTimes reports.

Consumers would purchase a tablet device running Android if it just had the right price tag. Nearly 50 percent of respondents said they’d get an Android tablet if it had all the features of the iPad, but cost less than $300, according to Retrevo.

The survey of 1,000 people finds demand jumps up to 79 percent if the price falls below $250. Asked which brands consumers would consider purchasing a tablet from, 55 percent said "Amazon."

Walmart has integrated its movie streaming service, VUDU, on Walmart.com. Customers can now shop for thousands of digital VUDU titles, including the hottest new releases, and purchase and/or rent them directly on Walmart.com at www.walmart.com/vudu.

As customers shop for movies at Walmart.com, they now have the option to select the digital VUDU title or the physical title (DVD or Blu-ray Disc). Those who select the digital title complete their transaction through Walmart.com’s checkout, and then can easily stream the movie directly from Walmart.com, VUDU.com, or from one of more than 300 VUDU-enabled devices, including select HDTVs, Blu-ray Disc players and the PlayStation 3.

Though near field communications continues to get legitimate attention as the communications method "of the future" for mobile payments, there are lots of ways to handle the communications.

Jumio thinks "webcams" can do the job. And, in fact, Jumio continues to believe that payments made by plastic cards still will be relevant in the future, especially for growing volumes of online commerce.

Jumio, an online payments start-up created by Jajah founder Daniel Mattes, thinks it makes sense to read online credit card payments made by scanning a card with a webcam.

"Netswipe" is designed to support online retailers, not physical retailers. the technology allows online retailers to easily process a debit or credit card payment by having a user just hold up their card to their webcam. The video is encrypted and streamed to Jumio’s servers, which extract the card number and information and processes the payment.

Fully 71 percent of online Americans use video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, up from 66 percent a year earlier, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The use of video-sharing sites on any given day also jumped five percentage points, from 23 percent of online Americans in May 2010 to 28 percent in May 2011.

“The rise of broadband and better mobile networks and devices has meant that video has become an increasingly popular part of users’ online experiences,” says Kathleen Moore, author of the report. “People use these sites for every imaginable reason."

Any way you look at it, YouTube is a big part of mobile application usage, at least as measured by bandwidth consumption and demand. YouTube seems to represent 22 percent of all consumed application bandwidth, according to Allot Communications.

YouTube also represents more than half of all streaming video as well.

A new study by Allot Communications suggests use of VoIP and instant messenger applications by mobile users increased 101 percent over the past six months.

"Consumers’ willingness to pay for voice calls has decreased over time," Allot says. It also is becoming more obvious that consumers’ appetite for paid SMS/MMS services also has also diminished, Allot says.

Made-for-mobile, operating system-agnostic IM applications like Viber are becoming increasingly popular, and it isn't simply carrier-provided messaging services that will start to feel increasing competition. Apple’s iMessage and Google Disco also will allow consumers to use messaging clients "over the top."

Twitter also grew by almost 300 percent in six months, providing enriched personal and multi-recipient messaging capabilities, which can easily replace SMS, Allot says. "In the past couple of months, we have also seen operators like KPN openly reporting their revenue loss to OTT applications like…

Is the iPad is outselling Android tablets at a rate of over 24 to 1? Some think so. Strategy Analytics estimates iPad shipments at 61 percent of the market, with Android tablets garnering 30 percent of shipments. But shipment rates are not the same thing as sales rates, of course. Most observers expect the gap to close, over time. Until recently, there were no tablets to buy, other than Apple's devices. Still, given the complete dominance Apple has in the MP3 player market, some have to wonder whether Apple can create an "iPad" market where others see a "tablet market."

The amount of money a firm has to spend on customer service often is directly related to the way it sells, and what it sells. Mobile phones, for example, can be complicated products for consumers to learn how to use. As any mobile retailer will attest, device complexity ("I can't get it to work") is a major cause of device returns in the first several weeks many users have new devices. One way to reduce the volume of such returns is to design user interfaces so they are more intuitive. The other tactic is to conduct better in-store training for consumers, or to automate set-up processes. For some Android retailers, the processes haven't been optimized, with predictable results.

"Most manufacturers are facing: the return rate on some Android devices is between 30 and 40 percent, in comparison to the iPhone 4′s 1.7 percent return rate as of Antennagate in 2010," says John Biggs of TechCrunch. Returns cost money, because they require time taken away from other …

Meet Dave, the IT guy. Once upon a time, Dave was at peace with his network. But one day, Dave’s network began to change, his users went mobile, and their apps moved to the cloud. They guzzled bandwidth, and from so many different devices Dave couldn’t keep count. But Dave had to serve them with the same old networking technology. It was expensive, complex, and there was no budget to hire more people or go out for more training. Meraki's cloud-controlled hardware is the solution, Meraki says..

The findings won't surprise you but European mobile users now spend more time texting than using voice; and much more time texting, using multimedia messaging, instant messaging and email than they do voice, the Yankee Group says.

U.S. subscribers came in at 24.6 million, and global numbers were at 25.6 million, about in line with expectations.Subscribers on hybrid plans -- DVD and streaming -- declined a little bit during the quarter, possibly because Netflix raised prices.

It may not always seem like it, but wherever an enterprise information technology staff is responsible for providing applications or communications to end-users, it takes on the mantle of being a service provider.

If, or more normally when, a user calls to report a problem with the app that they use, they’re not calling to report a congested network or server with memory exhaustion or any of the other components that make up the delivery chain, what they are concerned about is the experience they receive at the point of delivery. This makes IT responsible for delivering an end-to-end service, even when there are no agreed service levels.

As more services move to cloud-based mechanisms, it does not take much understanding or imagination to assume similar pressures will arise even for consumer services. It is hard to imagine an application provider or service provider selling a gaming, video or other service and not being called upon to provide some level of service assurance beyond &qu…

All three major credit-rating firms have threatened to lower their top triple-A rating on U.S. debt if the White House and Congress don't come to an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. We now have a total of eight days to get legislation written and passed, and in any case, the rating agencies will require both spending cuts that seem unreachable, as well as some reasonable assurance that actual will to get spending under control exists.

At the moment, neither of those requirements seems to exist. Get ready: U.S. debt is about to get a historic downgrade.

Mobile commerce and mobile app use now has become a sort of bifurcated phenomenon. Traditionally, "mobile" tended to refer to use of mobile phones to support some category of usage. These days, "mobile" apps and usage refer both to mobile "small screen" devices and "larger screen" tablets, plus notebook and other "large screens" used in an tether-less context. And there now is some thinking that widespread use of tablet devices could change user behavior in the e-commerce area. Ownership of tablet devices in the U.S. market, for example, is estimated by Forrester Research to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 51 percent from 2010 to 2015. So why might that matter? Arguably most e-commerce takes place on PC type screens, though more commerce, especially digital content sales, happens on mobile phones and smaller screen devices such as iPods. So the obvious question is how behavior could change as more users have tablet-sized…

Google has come under some criticism by users for not allowing pseudonyms of various types, such as names using odd characters or fake names. Google VP Vic Gundotra acknowledges the issue, but says the issue is not "use of pseudonyms.

He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like 'god' or worse. That might be a design philosophy aligned with Google+ efforts to connect real people in natural ways. That task arguably is harder, or subject to "gaming," if "non-real" or "non-natural" names are used.

Gundotra says Google has made some mistakes, in that regard, while doing the first pass at Google+ and that they are learning. The issue is different from the "anonymous" poster or anonymous identity considerations that in some cases can be important. Robert Scoble - Google+

"It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the center of a mobile revolution," says a report published in the Guardian. The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking.

"The Google Sites mobile experience also got an upgrade. We added five new mobile site templates to make it easy to build and launch a site that looks great on the small screen. This video explains how.

One of the key parts of the Coca-Cola approach to media is the use of three domains: paid (advertising), earned (social media), owned (brand events, sites) that in many cases overlap.

As Wendy Clark, SVP of Integrated Marketing and Communication for Coca-Cola will tell you, media is viewed as paid, earned, owned, and shared.

This is not at all unique to Coke, but certainly sets the stage for understanding how the company views and segments its overall marketing. Read more here.

In past decades, earned media would primarily have been seen as “stories in newspapers, magazines, on radio or TV.” Notice the change: all the “earned” exposure is earned on social media.

Coca-Cola’s concept of “liquid” means the company’s content is produced in a framework of dynamic storytelling that has a natural affinity to go to the furthest points possible. They are thinking strictly in terms of how the content they produce will be share…

Venture capital king Ben Horowitz, who apparently engineered Skype’s $8.5 billion sale to Microsoft, says there is no Internet investing bubble, for a number of reasons. “With costs 100 times lower, programmer productivity 10 times higher, and the market 50 times larger, it stands to reason that many more Internet businesses will work today than the last time around,” he argues. Moreover, “software is eating the world,” transforming or obliterating industries like print publishing, music distribution, radio, and direct marketing, he notes. With so much new business right around the corner, he argued that the high stock prices attached to social media “have not become completely divorced from any rational thought." What happens in bubbles is that people come up with all kinds of reasons why valuations that seem out of whack really are not out of whack.

"Having done some digging with the rest of the team at PR company Punch to find out a bit more about how it works, we found that Google is a great source of links that can be used for SEO benefit," says Alex Smith at Punch Communications. "Google has opted to allow links that pass page rank in contrast to the other major networks such as Facebook and Twitter which only allow links that Google’s spiders can’t follow, and I think it’s likely that this could be part of the Google project strategy to grow as big as the two social media giants."Why Google is Great for SEO

Google says its Google+ service still isn't optimized for business accounts, and apparently means it. Google removed pages set up by Sesame Street and Ford Motor Company, Mashable and Search Engine Land. The reason, Google manager Christian Oestlien later explained in a post and a YouTube video, was that the “platform at the moment is not built for the business use case.” He promised that the company would continue to disable such profiles until the network rolled out a business option in the “next few months.”

People are spending more time inside mobile application on average than they are on the web, according to Flurry. Playing games and social networking represent 79 percent of people's time, according to Flurry. The rest is news, entertainment, and other apps.

For some businesses, use of daily deal sites might help boost sales and increase new customers, while for others, it might not. Restaurants, for example, seem to be a great fit for these daily deal sites, whereas other businesses might not benefit as well.

Over the last year, Verizon wireline voice revenue has dropped from 17 percent of total revenue to 14 percent. Wireless revenue grew to 63 percent of total revenue, up from 61 percent a year ago. FiOS services, which includes some voice contribution, contributes 14 percent of total revenue, up from 13 percent a year ago. Read more here.

As was the case for AT&T, fixed line broadband service revenue was up substantially, growing 21 percent, year over year. FiOS-based revenues now represent 57 percent of total fixed-line consumer revenues.

But one might wonder, given the huge investment Verizon has made in FiOS, compared to its huge profile in wireless, how valuable that investment has been. Nobody would question the need to have made the broadband upgrade, though some might still wonder whether another,less expensive design would have been sufficient. The contrary view is that Verizon might have done less well had it chosen not to upgrade to a full fiber-to-home network.

Strategy Analytics says last-quarter tablet shipments (quarter ending June 2011) topped 15.1 million units, a material increase over the 3.5 million units from the year-ago period. Apple remained in the number-one slot with 9.25 million iPads sold, representing a 61 percent share of the tablet market overall.

At the same time, Android tablets have gone from 2.9 percent market share in June 2010 to 30.1 percent in June 2011, a 27 percentage point increase based on sales of 4.55 million units. In the year-ago quarter Apple enjoyed a 94 percent share. The issue, over the longer term, is whether the relevant market is "tablets" or "iPads." It isn't a rhetorical question. The "MP3 market" is not nearly as accurate description of the portable music player market as "the iPod market," some would argue.

What every other supplier than Apple has to worry about is some similar development in the tablet market. Things will change, but at the moment som…

According to Good Technology, which provides mobile device management services to 49 of the Fortune 100 and 182 of the Fortune 500, 27 percent of the mobile devices activated by its enterprise customers during the second quarter of 2011 were tablets. And most of those were iPads.

By many estimates, U.S. businesses with five to 99 employees account for around half the U.S. gross domestic product and more than half the employment. So it is not surprising that In-Stat estimates, by 2015, small business spending on wireline voice services will approach $16 billion, which represents nearly 50 percent of all spending in the category.

“Wireline voice, although not growing in any significant way, is holding steady across all sizes of business,” says Greg Potter. It appears that access services will fare better than international long distance, though. “One service segment we see that could be vulnerable due to alternative technologies like VoIP, is international long distance services. Even though the total dollar spend remains high, we see negative growth over the forecast period.”

In small business, the hospitality and food vertical will spend the most on wireline voice services, reaching $2 billion by 2012. Total toll-free service expenditures will increase by $134 m…

While visitors to online auto sites are growing at 30 percent year over year, visitors to mobile auto sites have grown 463 percent, more than 15 times the rate of growth for online visitation, a new study by Jumptap has found. The research showed that those visiting mobile auto content sites were more likely to own a tablet than the overall mobile population, and also much more likely to own a smart phone. A full 69 percent of visitors accessing mobile auto sites are using smart phones. Jumptap Auto Research Shows Mobile Devices Growing 15 Times Faster Than Online

Is mobile research, especially smart phone research, going to rescue market research and present us with a panoply of new options, or is it destined to be a niche player? Offering their views in this webinar are:

"Twitter wants to be “the world in your pocket,” according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, but more than anything, it wants to be the engine of mobile and real-time commerce in your pocket. The company sees a future in “removing friction” from e-commerce and allowing companies to target their users directly in real time. That needs a little "unpacking." When a social network talks about enabling e-commerce, it means use of the Twitter platform as a way of delivering offers to potential customers. The Twitter CEO said that the company sees a number of opportunities when it comes to enabling — and taking a share of the revenue from — direct e-commerce with users via the service, because “we already see a tremendous amount of commerce taking place on the platform.”

As an example, Costolo talked about how Google tweeted a promotion code that people could use for tickets to its recent IO conference, and about 100 tickets sold in a little over 10 minutes. “That’s $55,000 with one…

Gary Kim has been a communications industry analyst and journalist for more than 25 years, and currently works mostly as a content developer (marketing copy, white papers, applied research, conference and blog content).

He speaks often at industry events, has written one book and a half dozen major market studies and 14,000 articles.

His work is noted for its examination of business model issues, especially wireless and mobile.

He recently founded the Spectrum Futures conference for the Pacific Telecommunications Council.

He was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes; ranked second in the world for strategic coverage of the mobile business.

He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top 2 percent.